SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is setting up a new road map committee to provide broad market inputs on directions and timing for the next version of the short-range wireless link.
The effort comes as a specification for a 1 to 2 Mbit/s version of Bluetooth has completed a first round of testing and much work has been done on broadening the link's multimedia support.
At the Bluetooth Americas conference here Tuesday (Dec. 9), Mike McCamon, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG issued a general call for anyone interested in joining the new group that will help define broad market requirements for the future of the 723 kbit/s wireless link used mainly for wireless cellphone headsets, keyboards and mice. The group is expected to have its first meeting in January and to issue some initial guidelines in the spring.
"This is another mechanism for getting input from different market sectors so we can make sure our future specs are ones the market wants," said McCamon.
"In the past there were many obvious things that needed doing, and no one questioned what to do next," said Markus Schetelig, chairman of the SIG and acting chair of the new road map group. "Now that the key specs are mature, and we are getting to the point where there will be a bigger payoff for being closely linked with market demands," added Schetelig, who is also a senior manager for wireless enhancements for Nokia.
The SIG has already queued up work on a number of advancements for the technology that could be in a next major release of Bluetooth. "The SIG's technical board will work closely with the new road mapping group. I think its best when you have technology and marketing people working together," said Thomas Muller, chair of the SIG's architecture review board and a Nokia technical manager.
Perhaps the most prominent of the updates on deck is a so-called medium-rate version that will offer effective data rates of 1.4 and 2.1 Mbits/s based on a switch to four- or eight-level Phase Shift Keying modulation, respectively. The technology could be used for bandwidth hungry applications such as digital cameras and MP3 players or be used to lower power consumption by as much as two-thirds for devices such as wireless cellular headsets.
Cambridge Silicon Radio (Cambridge, England) and Silicon Wave (San Diego) have jointly tested products that conform to the still-unofficial spec. The SIG will sponsor a formal gathering to test medium-rate products in February.
"I predict that within two years of the spec being released, three-quarters of the Bluetooth products shipped will be using it," said J. Eric Janson, vice president of marketing for CSR. The company's existing BlueCore3 products will support the spec with a firmware upgrade, he added.
Separately the SIG has a quality-of-service mechanism far along in development that could help multimedia devices gain needed access to bandwidth. MP3 players and home audio headsets could use the spec to go wireless.
Meanwhile, an A/V working group made up primarily of consumer companies in the SIG is developing a real-time streaming spec for Bluetooth based on the Real Time Protocol and the Real Time Control Protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force. A separate group of PC-based companies is looking at a real-time streaming spec over the Internet Protocol.
The SIG is also nearly finished with a software profile for using cellular SIM cards to identify a subscriber's phone service details over a Bluetooth link in a car.
Several Bluetooth backers expressed optimism the technology, which has been widely hyped, is finally starting to catch on, particularly in GSM handsets in Europe and, to a lesser extent in notebook PCs. Nokia is launching 18 products using Bluetooth this year, 10-15 percent of Motorola's phones will be equipped with Bluetooth by the end of 2004, including at least one CDMA model, and IBM and Toshiba are increasing the number of their notebook PC models using Bluetooth, according to representatives of the companies here.
"We foresee shipping in excess of tens of millions of phones using Bluetooth in 2004," said Steve Deutscher, director of product management for phone peripherals at Motorola Inc. "One year ago I would have said I don't know about the future of Bluetooth, but we are finally at the point now where we can see this getting into mass-market products," he added.
International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.) estimates 29 million Bluetooth chips shipped in 2002, a number that will increase to 637 million in 2007. By that time as many as 65 percent of all cellular handsets, 44 percent of PDAs and 36 percent of notebooks could have Bluetooth built in, according to IDC.
The market watcher projects the average selling price of Bluetooth chips will fall from $4.75 this year to $3.45 in 2004 and $2.30 in 2007. Based on price declines for chips and batteries, one headset maker said it will ship by June a $59 Bluetooth headset, down from $99 today.
